Again, Into Light: An ecological microcinema screening curated by Zoë McKay

Again, Into Light: An ecological microcinema screening curated by Zoë McKay

Date: Friday, November 20, 2026

Time: Doors at 6:30pm, screening at 7:00pm

Address: 100 Arthur Street (Artspace Building – Access Information)

Location: WFG Blacklodge (room 304 – 3rd Floor)

Cost: Free admission

The screening will be under 60 minutes and will be followed by a post-screening discussion with filmmakers in attendance.

What memories and secrets are held by water? What do dogs dream of? What do the movements of plants sound like? Why does the last surviving member of a species continue to sing? As dispersers, ecosystem architects, bioengineers, and a species dependent on water, soil, and other species for our survival, what are our responsibilities to the world around us and other species who inhabit it alongside us? 

Again, Into Light is an ecological microcinema screening exploring the entangled lives of plants, animals, water, and human beings. Through a selection of experimental, independent short Super 8mm and 16mm films sourced from the Winnipeg Film Group distribution catalogue, this screening invites us to consider our world as an interspecies web of relationships simultaneously enriched and endangered by our shared vulnerability and interdependence. 

The films selected use an array of techniques linking the physical film medium to the natural world: processing film with seaweed, leaves, lichen, and fungi; using sensitive microphones to capture the secret sounds of plants; recording at a framerate synchronized with a hummingbird’s beating wings; scoring a soundtrack comprised of the last known recording of an extinct bird’s song. 

Working with the material qualities of Super 8mm and 16mm film, these works offer ways of seeing that resist the familiar and make room for ambiguity, curiosity, intimacy, grief, and wonder. They invite us to re-establish contact with our role in the living world, to look differently, and to attend to the lives unfolding around and beyond us. Cinema becomes an opportunity to consider other ways of knowing and experiencing the world: through observation, sensation, memory, and our shared participation in the more-than-human world. 

With the attendance of local filmmakers and presented with the Winnipeg Film Group, Again, Into Light is an invitation to gather, watch, listen, and imagine otherwise. Through the shared document of experimental cinema, we are invited to reconsider the boundaries between human and nonhuman, self and environment, observer and observed. We are encouraged to experience ourselves once more as part of the living world, and to reflect upon the urgently relational nature of our survival and collaboration with other species. 

Winter 

Kaua’i ‘ō’ō | Dir. Samy Benammar |2023 |QC | 4 min

In 1987, the song of the kaua’i ō’ō, a bird endemic to Hawaii, is recorded for the last time. Its song serves as the starting point for a visual exploration of the landscape and the winged creatures inhabiting it. The film is a visual poem caught between the chaos of disappearance and the calm of an aerial melody that takes us on a journey through seasons and territories.

Fevered | Dir. Tracy Peters| 2021 |MB | 5 min

Fevered is a meditation on the heated drama enacted by lakes and rivers as winter unravels. Piecing together 16mm footage and sound recordings, Peters re-imagines the pulsing of waterways as a metaphorical rhizome swelling outward in a feverish response to global warming. 

Spring 

Anomalies dans le paysage | Dir. Felix Caraballo | 2025 | QC | 8 min

A film in four tableaux – four audiovisual landscapes that unfold in all their strangeness. Spices, leaves, and local seaweed reveal and imbue with their hues this film shot and developed on the very banks of the Magtogoek/St. Lawrence river.  

Mammoth | Dir. Rachel Evans | 2025 | BC | 5 min

A theory of dreams for the dogs of a remote Northern Canadian community. Filmed on 16mm in the Yukon, processed with plants, lichen, and fungi from the region, colored and scratched by hand. This surreal exploration of gold mining town Dawson City through the lens of its free-range dogs lulls audiences into a sublime visual experience, filled with nostalgic cinematic artifacts and canine memory-scapes. 

Summer 

Be Happier | Dir. Jennifer Still | 2026 | MB | 6 min 

Shot at 54 frames per second, the approximate beat of a hummingbird’s wings, a poet focuses her lens on what is just out of view in this buoyant, open-air conversation with her 103-year-old grandmother in a garden. Bucket-processed by hand in the Red River Valley, Treaty 1 Territory, Homeland of the Red River Métis, Winnipeg. 

Autumn 

Demi Monde | Dir. Caroline Monnet | 2013 |QC | 4 min

A distinct world – that is often an isolated part of a larger world – is viscerally envisioned in this uniquely hand-processed film. 

Mother Nature | Dir. Cooper | 2026 | ON | 5 min

Mother Nature is an abstract exploration of the natural world and its ongoing struggle for survival. Shot on 16mm, the film uses texture, movement, and form to express the tension between resilience and destruction within nature’s fragile ecosystems. The film has been physically altered through a series of material interventions, transforming the celluloid itself to mirror the erosion, violence, and beauty found in nature’s own processes. The experimental soundtrack was created by capturing the hidden sounds of plants through sensitive microphones, amplifying the subtle vibrations and internal rhythms of organic life.  

Funding is provided by the Manitoba government. 

We graciously thank the Student Work Placement (SWP) program for supporting the position of Digitization and Collections Assistant, held by Zoë McKay. The SWP program is funded in part by the Government of Canada. The Cultural Human Resources Council (CHRC) is the delivery organization for the SWP program.